Shadow Cops

Sixty-three miles an hour and "Four Eyes the Wise Guy" is doing business on the expressway to Miami, pulling his typical hyper number, yammering on the portable, talking points and making thousands of dollars in illegal football bets while steering with one knee and scribbling wagers on a tally sheet in the passenger seat of his Cadillac.

"Eyes" is a wise guy in the gambling world, not in the mobster sense. As a sports betting wise guy he is prolific and professional - wagering $50,000 a day, spending 14 of every 24 hours on the phone calling dozens of bookies across the country to work the betting lines.

The detectives cruising next to him in a smoky-windowed van have been tailing Eyes for 23 straight days, following him from his home in Palm Beach to his bagel store, to his barber, to his favorite restaurant and also to his payoff spots in Miami, where he is either collecting on a good bet or forking over for a bad one. Eyes doesn't have a clue that his every move is being photographed and documented.

On the day that detectives from the Metropolitan Organized Crime Intelligence Unit (MIU) finally show Eyes a photo of himself on I-95 making the ledger entry, he is dumbfounded and wonders aloud why they aren't arresting him.

But that is not the way of MIU. You don't arrest the rungs of a ladder, you step on them, use them, and keep climbing. And if you're good, and if you're lucky, you get to the top. And when you get to the top, you don't take down one wise guy, you take down an entire multimillion-dollar international sports-gambling ring.

ONLY 12 YEARS AGO BROWARD POLICE WERE STILL SMALL-TOWN. Territorial, jealous, too proud to ask for help and too bureaucratic to share, the individual county law-enforcement agencies played right into the hands of organized crime. Groups that ran prostitution, loansharking, pornography and illegal gambling rings luxuriated in the scatter.

Twice in the early 1980s, Broward grand juries concluded that the fragmented police structure was actually conducive to such organizations, which by their nature jump across jurisdictional lines and boundaries to avoid the law.

In 1983, the police chiefs of the county's largest cities, the Broward Sheriff, the State Attorney and the head of the state's Alcoholic Beverages & Tobacco Division made a pact.

"We decided that combining resources would be the most effective way to combat organized crime," says Broward State Attorney Mike Satz, one of those founders. "The way things were set up, it just wasn't working. It's an area where you need to share intelligence, resources and talent."

MIU was formed as an answer.

Over the next 12 years, this group of specialized cops from the major agencies in the county fashioned themselves into surveillance experts, covert accountants, paper-trailers, wiretap specialists and computer searchers.

They took on cases that led from small-time bookies to luxury-apartment boiler rooms working for the mob, cases that took them from a terrified extortion victim to a Vietnamese prostitution and drug operation, cases that started with an inexplicable rise in a neighborhood's street violence and led to a Guyanese narcotics ring.

They are working dozens of investigations today that not only jump across county boundaries but flash across the country and around the world; the kinds of complicated, out-of-sight, insidious crimes that no one else has the manpower or the time to pursue.

"This unit was created with the intention of staying ahead of organized-crime groups, and when we say organized crime, we're not only speaking of the traditional Mafia family types," says MIU director Ken Staab, a 22-year veteran of the Pompano Beach Police Department.

"South Florida has always been open territory to many of the traditional families and local racketeers living off criminal enterprises. Now, we've become international. We've got criminal groups from Russia, Asia, South America, the Caribbean. They're all here. And over the years, we've helped bring down operations connected with every one of them."

You won't see MIU cops on the television news. Rarely will you read of them. What credit they get is lumped in with half a dozen other federal, state and local agencies when some indictment is handed down.

But the MIU mission is simply stated and hard to achieve: "We're not in it for the short haul. We don't make quick, easy arrests," says detective Dave Flynn, a Pompano Beach officer who has been with MIU since its inception. "If we target an organization, what we're after is the total destruction of that operation, top to bottom, nothing left standing.

"When we get them, they're not going to just move down the street and start up again. If they do, they're going to have to start from scratch."

"YEAH, THIS IS 238."

"238, ya gotta book?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Whattaya want?"

"Game two, plus 13 for two dimes. Game six, minus 281/2 for two dimes. Game seven plus 15 for three dimes. Game 10 plus 71/2 for a nickel."